Review: Richmond Speaks Building-to-Building

By Lauren Licklider

The most basic element of community design is the human-to-human relationship. A community identifies a need. The design of that need grows out of consensus, engagement, and scores of volunteers. Storefront’s usual “people first” approach was called into question (or, temporarily put to rest) through a lively panel discussion on the exhibit, “Richmond as a Work of Art,” which focused on the dynamics of the building-to-building relationship across our city’s unique landscape.

"Richmond as a Work of Art" installed in 201 East Broad Street. Courtesy of Storefront staff.

The exhibit was designed by Emma Fuller (a Richmond native) and Michael Overby, both architects and professors based in New York. Throughout the month of October the exhibit (which debuted this past summer at the Richmond Public Library) filled two empty storefronts at North 2nd & East Broad Streets through a partnership with Storefront and Cultureworks.

From left: Trask, Tsachrelia, Slipek, Martin, and Pinnock. Courtesy of Storefront staff.

Fuller assembled a panel of cultural leaders who came from a mix of backgrounds: architects Dimitra Tsachrelia of Steven Holl Architects and Burt Pinnock of Baskervill, the muralist Ed Trask, Style Weekly architecture critic Edwin Slipek, and the Valentine’s director Bill Martin. The panel led a spirited discussion that revealed a hunger for new platforms to publicly discuss design, and with that, the critiques inherent to meriting architecture that it is inextricably tied to both historic and contemporary injustices.

The location of the panel discussion at the VCU Depot building unearthed this tension early on. Before its award-winning 2014 renovation by Commonwealth Architects, the VCU Depot served as a commuter train station between Richmond and Ashland from 1907–1938. Before panelists could lament bygone rail or dote on the building’s architecture, Martin reminded the panel of the two sets of doors from the building revealed during the renovation. On one set, the words Whites Only were scrawled out. The other? Blacks Only.

The Depot in 1907. Courtesy of VCU News.

“The memories of these buildings aren’t always romantic,” Martin said. “If you were white, your experience in this building meant something very different than if you were black.” Can you appreciate the Depot’s classical symmetry without acknowledging that it served as a handy device for segregating waiting rooms? Essentially, Martin argued, buildings represent a singular moment, but great public and cultural buildings often reflect the values of a privileged class.

Flashing forward, and a block away, how does the VCU Institute of Contemporary Art reflect our values today? Tsachrelia is a project architect of the building and brought a wealth of insight to the discussion, sharing with the audience the process her team took to make decisions about how the ICA would look and what purpose it would serve. “Not everything is about the past,” she said. “The ICA is about the future, about defining what we as a community want to be through a place.”

Sketch of the ICA. Courtesy of ica.vcu.edu.

The ICA will house revolving exhibitions, performances, films, and educational programming while also serving as an incubator for the school’s renowned public arts program. Its location — a half-block of a lackluster stretch of Broad Street — is pivotal, suggested Slipek. Projects such as the ICA exist within the larger context of university and urban planning goals. Even though it has barely risen out of the ground, the downtown Arts & Cultural District thrives in anticipation of its new sculptural bookend. Coffee shops have sprung up, a neighboring gas station has been demolished, and even the VCU Depot was brought back to life in anticipation of the ICA.

Things exist the way they do because they were planned that way, Slipek mused. Everything from the uber-chic ICA to a crumbling homes a few blocks away. Nothing is accidental. In Richmond, Fuller acknowledged, our architectural works speak to one another; the cityscape has an ongoing conversation between time periods, architectural styles, and values. Add a social justice perspective into the mix, and design of the city can also be read as a physical manifestation of social struggle. Almost all of our panelists conceded that there is a natural tension between creating a vision and serving the community. That said, where does community engagement fit into the process of creating of great works of architecture?

“While no great building has ever been built by consensus, it has been built by compromise,” prompted Burt Pinnock. He’s the architect for the Black History Museum in Jackson Ward, scheduled to open in February 2016. He went on to suggest that while many buildings stem from one person’s vision, that vision only gets community support when their voice is heard. Public forums, design competitions, and open dialogues between designers and the public are all incredibly useful tools when used the right way.

The Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia (housed in the former Leigh Street Armory). Courtesy of the blackhistorymuseum.org.

Another useful tool? Art, added Trask. His murals often memorialize the voices that have been lost in the shuffle of Richmond’s development. “The art I put on these walls is used as a conversation starter to bring up the untold stories and past lives of these buildings.” One of his recent projects included collaborating with a small neighborhood school to paint a mural on the entire exterior of its recently adapted building. While he brought a concept to the table, the teachers and students shared in the process of painting. The forgiving and temporal medium of paint makes more community involvement possible, and muralists can achieve results with communities at an architectural scale. 

Courtesy of edtrask.com.

Storefront's Program Director Tyler King closed the panel with a question: “Is it utopian to think that we can create beautiful works of architecture the community loves, that doesn’t also encroach on communities who have historically been ignored? Maybe,” he said. “But if great works of architecture cannot first be imagined through consensus, then how will they ever materialize?”

Architecture gives us an identity. It asks and answers important questions: Who were we? Who are we now? Who do we want to be? But perhaps the more important questions stem from something bigger at play: Who had a voice? Who didn’t?

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Lauren Licklider is the Marketing Manager at Baskervill, and at Storefront, she consults on community design projects, helps plan events, and serves as a communications committee member.

mOb on Monument

Courtesy of middleofbroad.tumblr.com.

Every semester, Storefront's community design apprentices at mOb respond to a prompt from faculty and a guest critic. These weeklong investigations, called mObjObs, are intensive, speculative, and often provocative design exercises. This year, mOb invited guest critic Burt Pinnock — a Storefront co-founder, Baskervill principal, and architect. Students adopted a fictitious design competition format as an entry point into the national debate about what to do with confederate heritage. Proposals for the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue included:

Turn it upside down.
Replace it with Maggie Walker.
Cover it with kudzu.
Envelop it with smoke.
Auction it off.
Pixelate it.
Pepper it with #blacklivesmatter signs.
Put a tutu on it.
Or just leave it.

During First Friday November, mObjOb 6 concluded with Richmond's very first public forum to unpack contemporary views on confederate heritage. A panel discussion titled, "General Demotion? General Devotion?" was moderated by the Valentine's Bill Martin, and guests included architectural historian Calder Loth, Richmond Times Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams, and VCU Art Education professor Dr. Melanie Buffington.

Proposals are on view for the month of November at our studio space at 205 East Broad Street. Stream or download the discussion below.

From left: Buffington, Williams, Loth, and Martin.

Design a Shed in Jackson Ward

A Jackson Ward resident is seeking guidance on the design of a shed that works with in the City Old & Historic District guidelines, which state: "Newly constructed outbuildings such as detached garages or tool sheds should respect the siting, massing, roof profiles, materials and colors of existing outbuildings in the neighborhood. New outbuildings should be smaller than the main residence and be located to the rear and/or side of the property to emphasize their character as secondary structures." Architects with experience working within Richmond's COHD's are encouraged to advise the applicant on the conceptual phases of this project.

Discuss "Richmond as a Work of Art" with leaders in Arts & Design

A panel discussion on the exhibit Richmond as a Work of Art will be held on Saturday, October 24th at the VCUarts Depot (2:30 – 4:00pm) featuring a selection of Richmond’s cultural figures: Edwin Slipek, Bill Martin, Ed Trask, Burt Pinnock as well as Dimitra Tsachrelia (Steven Holl Architects, New York). 

Richmond as a Work of Art studies the founding conditions of a historic city to distill the modern consequences and to project a future civic vision. Archival research and original drawings of the city’s architectural form, infrastructural systems, and array of park spaces demonstrate the layering of history, the transformation of urban elements and their radical formal and programmatic reinvention.

The exhibition is currently on view at the intersection of East Broad and North Second Street in the windows of 201, 122 & 124 East Broad with an additional presentation in the gallery of The Storefront for Community Design. It first premiered in May of 2015 at Main Branch of The Richmond Public Library to the following review:

“Richmond as a Work of Art,”... offers a refreshingly different and highly enlightening lens through which to view infrastructural RVA. In a series of graphically simple, but elegantly designed wall scrolls that contain drawings, architectural plans and powerful photographs, curator Emma Fuller and photographer/draftsman Michael Overby offer up a highly contemporary architectural aesthetic that may challenge what places and spaces many folks consider worthy of consideration...

Edwin Slipek, Style Weekly, May 26 2015

The new iteration of the exhibition looks outwards from the storefront windows, with lighting during the evening hours to create a glowing installation across the intersection. The fabrication and current showing was made possible by support from CultureWorks, and the project draws on historic primary resources from local institutions including The Virginia State Library, The Virginia Historical Society, The Valentine Museum and The Richmond Public Library.

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PANELISTS

CRITIC: Edwin Slipek, Style Weekly
Edwin Slipek is a generator of architectural discourse in Richmond as the critic for Style Weekly, a professor of architectural history at VCU, and through his presence as a cultural figure in the city. He has designed theatrical sets, hosted exhibitions, documented Richmond through extensively published writings, and most recently co-founding the website ArchitectureRichmond. For his writing and teaching he has been awarded honorary membership in the Virginia Society of the American Institute of Architects.

DIRECTOR: Bill Martin, The Valentine
William J. Martin is the Director of The Valentine Museum. As an institutional leader he has transformed the museum’s identity and promoted the idea of an actively engaged archival resource. He works collaboratively with the city and local groups to publicize the rich history of Richmond and holds positions on several civic councils.

ARTIST: Ed Trask
Ed Trask is known for his murals internationally and has a main body of work in the Richmond Downtown area. His paintings have been included in the permanent collections of Gap, G.E., Capital One, Fortune Magazine, NBC, Philip Morris, Media General, Mars and Play, and his work is currently on view at the Glavekocen Gallery.

ARCHITECT: Dimitra Tsachrelia, Project Architect Steven Holl ICA Building
Dimitra Tsachrelia is an Associate with Steven Holl Architects and is the project architect of the Institute for Contemporary Art. As well as practising professionally, Dimitra also teaches a masters design studio at Columbia University with Steven Holl. She received her Diploma in Architecture from the Patras University School of Architecture, Greece and a M.Arch from Columbia University GSAPP.

ARCHITECT Burt Pinnock, Baskervill
Burt Pinnock is a Principal at Baskervill where he is the lead designer of the Black History Museum, a transformation of The Leigh Street Armory, as well as the Slavery and Freedom Heritage Sites. Previously he was a founding member of the award winning practice BAM Architects. He is a recipient of the Virginia Society AIA’s award for Distinguished Achievement.

Closing remarks by Tyler King
Tyler King is the Program Director of the Storefront for Community Design. He received a Bachelors degree in Urban Studies from VCU and attended Bauhaus Universitat’s Institute for European Urbanism. He serves as the President-Elect of Design VA at the Branch Museum for Architecture & Design and volunteers at ROSMY. 

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EXHIBITION DESIGNERS

Emma Fuller
Emma Fuller is a native of Richmond VA who moved to New York to receive her Bachelors from The Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. She currently teaches at Pratt Institute, is an Associate with Diane Lewis Architect, and pursues independent research projects. Her writing has appeared most recently in The Richmond Times Dispatch and Style Weekly, as well as an essay and recent drawings in the Cooper Union’s Open City published by Charta Milano. She is a guest contributing writer to the website ArchitectureRichmond and her first article will be published this fall. Emma has participated in symposia at both The Architectural League and the NY AIA Center for Architecture. Her work focuses on city plans and the development of architectural projects from historic research, existing plan relationships and the position of significant structures in the urban fabric.

Michael Overby
Michael Overby is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Architecture and was a finalist for the 2014-15 Rome Prize in Architecture. He is currently an Associate at RUR Architecture in NYC. His work addresses the latent subject matter embedded in architectural drawings and models, pursued through a variety of works including his most recent projects Little Monuments, Painted Fortresses, Broken Blocks, and In the Heather, a collaborative publication with a poet. He has been a teaching assistant in design studios and seminars at Princeton University, Columbia GSAPP, Pratt Institute, Syracuse University, and the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. 

"Richmond as a Work of Art" takes residency at 2nd & Broad

Storefront is excited to welcome guest curators Emma Fuller and Michael Overby, New York based designers of the exhibit "Richmond as a Work of Art." The show makes its second appearance after opening at Richmond Public Library in summer 2015. Throughout the month of October, the 12 panel installation will hang in empty storefronts facing the street at the intersection of 2nd & Broad Streets.

Read more about the exhibit in this Style Weekly review by architecture critic Ed Slipek:

By any measure, Richmond is distinguished physically by two factors — the James River and a collection of highly-textured and distinctive neighborhoods. That’s the take-away from most books, articles or exhibitions produced here during the past few decades that examined our city’s long history and continuing development. While few would argue the significance of the river or leafy locales, “Richmond as a Work of Art,” an exhibit now at the Richmond Public Library downtown, offers a refreshingly different and highly enlightening lens through which to view infrastructural RVA. Read full article.

The exhibit opens this Friday, October 2, at Storefront for Community Design, from 5 – 9pm. Stay tuned for more events related to the exhibit throughout the month.

Slipek notes in his review, "Wittingly or not, Fuller and Overby include a number of major engineering and landscaping projects and landmarks that, while defining the city, are currently under fire. These include the Diamond, a minor league ballpark, and Kanawha Plaza, an urban park that straddles atop the Downtown Expressway in the financial district."

Storefront to host Public Art Master Plan Meeting

You are invited to attend an open meeting for designers interested in discussing the future of public art in Richmond. Your ideas about what Richmond is and what it can be are important! This event is being held in support of Richmond’s effort to create a comprehensive plan for public art in the city.

Earlier this year, the City of Richmond's Public Art Commission embarked on the process of developing a Public Art Master Plan with the purpose of creating a five-to-ten-year plan that will provide a clear vision for the future of public art in Richmond. The plan will include goals for Richmond's public art, define priorities and artistic approaches for the program, identify strategic partnerships and possible sources of alternative funding, and provide direction for ongoing program development and management. The plan will also address opportunities for ongoing public engagement, support increased opportunities for public art, and celebrate art as an essential element for a thriving community.

Wednesday, October 14
6:00pm - 8:00pm

Storefront for Community Design
205 E Broad St
Richmond, VA 23219

Pop-Up RVA: Get your Space for the Race!

Pop-up RVA launches in September 2015 in anticipation of the 450,000 spectators during the nine-day UCI Road World Championships. These pop-ups will reactivate 5,000 square feet of vacant retail along the 100 and 200 blocks of East Broad Street throughout the month of September. Community partners include Storefront for Community Design, Downtown Neighborhood Association, Douglas Development Corporation, and the City of Richmond. Improvement efforts are sponsored by HandsOn Greater Richmond and Monument Construction.

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Since the opening of Storefront's East Broad Street location in 2012, thousands of square feet of commercial space have remained empty — some of them as long as 20 years. In 2011, Storefront's Program Director Tyler King documented the history of some of the buildings included in the scope of Pop-up RVA, and around 40 others. He created a catalog of these buildings called NTHNG MSSNG, describing their current condition and former uses. 

Check out a preview of the book below.

NTHNG MSSNG by R. Tyler King | Make Your Own Book

Design a Processing Kitchen for Community Garden

Storefront's volunteer landscape architects are working with VSU's Harding Street Community Garden initiative to create a variety of garden types along a corridor of vacant lots. Anchoring the block is a community center, which will be used as an educational space and processing kitchen for produce grown along Harding Street. The head of the program Duron Chavis is seeking assistance from an interior designer or architect to make the kitchen more efficient for processing vegetables.

Fall 2015 mOb Projects

NOTE: The deadline to become a mentor has passed. Contact Storefront if you're interested in mentoring in the future.

Under the guidance of a professional mentor, VCUarts faculty, and Storefront staff, mOb will be taking on 15 community projects in student groups of 2-4. mOb mentors spend between 5-10 hours over the course of the semester providing feedback and guidance to the student team as they develop their deliverables. If you're interested in any of the projects below, use the form below to sign up as a mentor. The mOb session begins on Tuesday, August 18th. After projects are assigned to students, a project lead will contact you.

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Institute for Contemporary Art
Designing a series of actions to create a presence for the ICA while the building is under construction.

Lillie Estes Mayoral Campaign
Designing an identity for community organizer Lillie Estes, who seeks the office of Mayor.

Recovery by Design
Developing a workshop for Storefront’s NEA-funded Recovery by Design series, and working with Richmond Behavioral Health Authority clients to curate an exhibit of outcomes from summer workshops.

VCU Office of Sustainability
Continuing to refine the design of a community garden on VCU’s campus.

Byrd Theater
Prototyping a uniform for staff based on film history, to enhance the Byrd experience.

Crystalis Institute
Transforming a basement with white cinderblock walls into a sacred space for nonprofit that promotes spirituality without organized religion.

Epiphany Preschool
Designing a variety of playhouses for 1-4 year olds, inexpensive and modern.

Friends of Riverview Park
Identifying community events that would be desirable to residents and creating a conceptual design for a skatepark, community garden, and playground.

Grace Inside
Working with a state prison chaplain to redesign an office.

Maymont Civic League
Helping to cultivate neighborhood pride through a flag, beautification projects, and developing programs to help residents with minor repairs and improvements of homes and properties, blighted/abandoned properties.

Richmond Anti-Violence Project
Create an identity for the VAVP, which works to address and prevent sexual and intimate partner violence within, and hate/bias motivated violence against, the LGBTQ community.

Saving Our Youth
Design a yearbook for this youth safety community organization.

Richmond City Health District
Creating architectural designs that could help customers make the "healthy choice the easy choice" and also experience the environment of the store as healthy and safety.

Valentine
Design an exhibit that explores — from Robert E. Lee to Arthur Ashe — what is a southern man?

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mOb is a  partnership of three design departments of VCUarts, Graphic Design, Fashion Design and Interior Design and one department of the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Urban and Regional Planning. These departments operate an design lab that realizes the potential of design to shape the City of Richmond.

mOb + Storefront is a collaboration of mOb and Storefront for Community Design that combines the energy, enthusiasm and expertise of VCU students and faculty with Storefront’s community involvement. mOb + Storefront operates on the principle that good design makes a healthier city where citizens participate more fully in their environment, their government and their culture.

How small structures fill big gaps in food access

Storefront volunteer consultant and former mOb student Colleen Brennan discusses the relationship between craft and food access. A furniture builder by trade, she has worked on two projects about food access at mOb + Storefront — through Shalom Farms and Tricycle Gardens. 

As most of us know, there are big gaps in the locations of grocery store chains that leave many without adequate supply of food. Having a background in craft, I’ve thought a lot about how removed we are from the production of the basic things we need every day, that being food and the infrastructure & tools necessary to prepare it. While the craft movement was originally founded to revive the dignity of labor and combat the dehumanizing effects of factory work, the movement has been revived with concerns that are more focused around sustainability — both environmental and economic. Now, the focus is more about locally sourced materials and makers as a form of ethical consumerism. These are largely the concerns of the "slow food/farm to table" movement as well.  The philosophies of these two movements have such similar sentiments, and in addition to the similarities in scale there is immense potential for them to intersect and expand access to good food on the local level.

Bacon's Rebellion. Map showing Richmond's urban food deserts by census tract (2012).

There are two ways that food can actually meet food desert: physically providing access and education. Accessibility to food will always require infrastructure on some level, and small grocery markets operate on a scale that lends itself well to craft. Tricycle Gardens is a nonprofit community garden that runs a program called Corner Farm, which carves out spaces in the corner stores of Richmond’s urban food deserts to offer locally grown produce. They have 11-15 participating stores thoughotut the city.  Tricycle Gardens reached out to Storefront to get help designing shelves for shelf stable produce.

Through Storefront's Design Session, Brennan devised a scheme to create shelves around the coolers provided through the Corner Farm program.

Another nonprofit I worked with during mOb, Shalom Farms, literally drives to neighborhoods without grocery stores. This past spring, we designed a system that will allow them to easily load their van and convert the van into a pop-up market for sales. They're working on implementing this now. Their focus on education provides access by way of knowledge sharing. Part of Shalom Farms’ program is teaching volunteer labor about farming techniques and the science behind it.  They provide access through education and therefore, personal agency. This is early DIY movement stuff — So punk!

Brennan managed a team of students through mOb studio to design a system that converts a 16 passenger van into a farm stand.

mOb + Storefront will continue to work on issues around food access during this Fall's session of mOb. Even without building structures, healthier options can be more readily available. The Richmond City Health District will serve as a client of mOb, and students will apply the principles of choice architecture (focusing on arrangement that prioritize healthy options) to a corner store in the Highland Park neighborhood.

Check out more of Colleen's work here!